Letting Off Steam

Valve is catching hell over its recent decision to allow pretty much any sort of game on Steam, with the caveats of anything "illegal" or "straight-up trolling" still being subject to scrutiny.  Naturally, people are freaking out.  They foresee the descent of Steam into a cesspool of hateful "games" which will serve as positive reinforcement for abhorrent behaviors.  Somehow, I doubt this is what will happen, at least as far as how some pundits are looking at it.

First Off . . .

Let's get the obligatory nonsense out of the way before going any further.  This is not a First Amendment issue.  This is not going to be a First Amendment issue until the Department of Justice attempts to bring Valve to court.  If another company or an individual attempts to sue Valve, and Valve's lawyers are stupid enough to try a First Amendment defense, the courts will likely rule against Valve.  This is not to say there are not First Amendment-related concerns, but any sort of appeal to those protections has to be very carefully framed.  The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association makes it very clear content-based regulations will not stand in court when the government (at the local, state, or federal level) is involved.  When it's two business entities or individuals, things get a little more complicated, but there is always the tacit understanding that the First Amendment might be involved peripherally but never directly.

Steam Cleaning

On the surface, there are some indicators to suggest potential hazards with Valve's approach.  Within hours of Valve's announcement, a new indie game called AIDS Simulator was announced, and it's about as contemptible as you'd expect.  Combined with studios like Digital Homicide, commenters who could potentially blast a game to the stratosphere with their opinions, and the rise of "asset flip" games clogging the store, it seems like a recipe for disaster.

However, the operative point some pundits seem to be overlooking is this: virtually all of these factors have been on Steam for a while now.  The apocalyptic flood of crap content being prognosticated should have happened already.  There's crap content, to be sure, but there's far more good content (or at least socially acceptable content)  than crap.  Valve's decision to step away from the role of arbiter could be likened to a store like Wal-Mart deciding to sell things which are legal even if they are not "acceptable."  If Wal-Mart decided to stock an anniversary edition of Mein Kampf on their shelves, nobody could argue they were doing anything more than being possibly distasteful.

For myself, I believe the idea of sunlight being the best medicine for an ill, especially a social ill, fits here.  Before, if Valve banned a game like AIDS Simulator, it would play right into the narrative of the developer that they're being persecuted.  It would create this sense of being "underground," something that "Gabe the Man" said wasn't good because he's wrong, and it would increase the allure of the game beyond its actual merits.  It would create the sort of "rebellion" that has spurred everything from the Oklahoma City bombing to the destruction of Palmyra.  By letting the sheep and the goats separate themselves, as it were, that sense of the taboo and forbidden evaporates.  While the developers of such trash games will still be out there, they will also be "out" there.  They can't blame anybody other than themselves for their failures and expect to be taken seriously.  They will be open to all of the disapproval and condemnation their beliefs merit.  Sure, they'll maybe make a few bucks, but not enough to cover the costs of making their weak-ass games.

Dirty Fun

Here's a fun fact for gamers to digest: there have been less than 30 games which have been rated as AO (Adults Only) by the ESRB.  A couple of them are fairly well known, such as Manhunt 2 (subsequently re-rated down to M) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (actually bumped up after release to AO from M because of the "Hot Coffee" scandal before patches brought it back down).  The rest, not as much, but the fact there are such a small number of games which have received the "kiss of death" speaks to something interesting.  There have been alternative storefronts such as itch.io which have been selling games (particularly Japanese-style visual novels) with explicit content, usually sexual in nature, but most developers would rather just mark their game as "unrated" rather than get the AO rating.

Up to this point, there's been a reason why the AO rating has been the kiss of death: the rating is deliberately intended to limit the market to individuals 18 or older.  It puts such games in the category of porn, even if they don't have any sexual content.  The big box stores like Best Buy and smaller shops like GameStop will not stock the games because they would have to segregate those titles away from the rest of the stock.  It should be pointed out that stores such as Fry's Electronics have adult sections for Blu-Ray and DVD video titles, so there's some proof that such a segregation can happen with minimal interference if the effort is made.  Outside of that, the three major console manufacturers won't allow titles with AO ratings to be released for their platforms.  Which leaves PCs as the only viable platform for those sorts of games.

Valve's decision to permit anything legal has the potential to turn the "kiss of death" to something manageable.  Yes, right now, the state of games with erotic elements is arguably poor.  But the funny thing about the overall quality of games is that they can improve when there are titles which set a better standard.  If gamers want better erotic games, there has to be room for such games to provide at least a break-even opportunity, just like any other regular game.  There has to be a place for the game equivalents of films such as Last Tango In Paris and Eating Raoul, or books like Venus In Furs and The Story of O, if only to set a standard for future developers to try and surpass.  And Valve's decision can potentially provide that opportunity.

The Fine Print

There's been a lot of speculation about why Valve is making this sort of move at this point in time.  Some point to the wildly inconsistent ban implementations prior to this point and figure Valve has reached the conclusion that it's better to say, "screw it" rather than put some those speculatively spectacular profits towards hiring and training of moderators.  Others are pointing to the recent grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and figure Valve wants to avoid being seen as a "publisher" in the same vein as Facebook.

So far, there's no evidence to suggest elements of Russian intelligence services have tried to "astroturf" Steam the same way they are alleged to have done with Facebook.  Even if they had tried, it's not likely the effort would have succeeded.  The key difference between Steam and Facebook is that Steam has evolved into a marketplace for games, whereas Facebook's evolution has been far less directed or focused.  Steam has never tried to be a media outlet, and has arguably minimal social media elements attached to it.  Sure, you have a friends list and can chat between them, but Steam doesn't crawl around your phone and email contact lists trying to find all the other people you know who use it.  That same differentiation could also potentially act as a shield (or at least a buffer) against the European GDPR which recently came into force.

The post on the Steam blog which announced the new policy is interesting.  A lot of the comments on the post itself seem to be fairly supportive of the decision.  Which makes the hand-wringing screeds in the gaming press all the more puzzling.  It's almost as if the gaming press is expecting Steam to devolve into an alt-right hellhole from which no good will ever escape.  I will argue that the scenario might happen or it might not.  Valve has declared it will not take any sides in the marketplace of ideas so long as it's not illegal or intended as blatant harassment.  Which means that Steam will be open to all sorts of game ideas.  If we apply Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap), then there will be lots of crap which will doubtlessly offend somebody no matter what their place on the ideological spectrum.  But the remaining 10% will be good gaming, even if it does offend.  More to the point, Valve making everything open means that EVERYTHING is open.  If you hate a game that came out because its focus is socially abhorrent to you, then you have the opportunity to release your own game to take it on.

Aristotle wrote, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."  I can entertain the thought that Steam will become the worst of the worst, but I cannot accept that thought.  The only way it can happen is game developers of a certain outlook and temperament fail to use the opportunity available to them.  Nobody is handed a victory simply because of their personal moral or political rectitude.  It must be earned, and Valve is giving everybody the chance to earn their victories.